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Daniel Inouye honored in Capitol Rotunda

Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye joined a rarefied group of Americans on Thursday, becoming just the 32nd person in the country’s history to be given the honor upon their death of lying in the Capitol Rotunda.

Vice President Joe Biden, Cabinet members, lawmakers and dozens of tearful staffers bid a final “Aloha” to Inouye during a solemn ceremony in the stately Rotunda. It was the same space where a freshman senator from Hawaii stood under the dome nearly 50 years ago and listened to the “shuffling of feet” as people quietly paid their respects to a fallen president, John F. Kennedy.

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Dan Inouye honored in Capitol Rotunda

PHOTOS: Daniel Inouye (1924-2012)

Inouye, a World War II combat veteran and the second-longest serving senator in history, died Monday from respiratory complications at age 88.

Powerful politicians and anonymous staffers came out to pay their respects to Hawaii’s patriarch. There was Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta, who was sent to Japanese internment camps at the same time Inouye was enlisting in the U.S. Army during the Second World War. U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke stood next to Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki.

And House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was flanked by Biden and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), a momentary show of bipartisanship amid the gridlocked fiscal cliff talks.

Inouye’s flag-draped coffin, resting on the same catafalque where Abraham Lincoln’s body was lain after his death, will remain in the Rotunda for public viewing through 8 p.m. Thursday, making him the first Asian American to receive that honor. Others include Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, House Speaker Henry Clay, and civil rights icon Rosa Parks.

“It’s fitting that he should lie in state beneath the enduring symbol of our democracy, the dome of the Capitol. …” Reid said. “Dan Inouye was an institution and deserves to spend at least another day in this beautiful building in which he dedicated his life.”

Inouye was remembered as “Danny,” a patriot, war hero, civil-rights leader and unabashed Democrat, even as he carried himself in a quiet and dignified manner in the halls of Congress. Raised in Honolulu, he watched planes fly overhead and bomb Pearl Harbor; because he had medical training, Inouye spent five days there tending to the injured and dying. He later would volunteer for an all-Japanese American Army unit called the 442 Regimental Combat Team, even though the U.S. government had declared all Japanese Americans “enemy combatants.”

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